Let’s talk about alternative legal careers.
Back in law school, the career services staff thought we were crazy when we said that we had no interest in practicing law. When we asked for assistance with alternative legal careers, they asked, “Why are you in law school?”
Some people land in law school upon realizing that a liberal arts degree offers few job opportunities and even less job security. Others know early in life that they want to be lawyers. (One of our friends swears that he showed up for his first day of kindergarten with his copy of Black’s Law Dictionary.)
Wherever you fall within the legal career realization spectrum, Law Day is a chance for you to share your knowledge about the law with people in your community who may not fully understand how the legal process works. Which would be most of them.
Lawyers make a lot of money, and just maybe, California law firms are part of the problem instead of the solution.
In the '90s, Silicon Valley powerhouse Gunderson Dettmer kicked off the salary shift in the Bay Area by offering new associates $125,000 salaries, which prompted competitors to match the blockbuster salaries. The cost of the salaries was passed along to the consumer as an increase in legal fees, reports Forbes.
Law and art regularly collide. There are intestacy and divorce battles over art collections. There are copyright infringement lawsuits against pop stars who base their music videos on famous photographs. There are models charged with public lewdness for posing nude ... among nude paintings.
From March 9 through April 19, SOMArts, located at 934 Brannan Street in San Francisco, will take a closer look at the intersection between law and art in a special exhibition called, "I Am Crime: Art on the Edge of Law."
There are a number of ways that you can while away the day on your iPhone. Angry Birds. Facebook. Antograph. Apps, you see, have replaced eyes as the windows to the soul.
Now, California lawyers have a new app option: the FindLaw Legal News App.
Sure, legal news is available all over the Internet, but the FindLaw Legal News App lets you search by topic, (e.g., criminal, injury, family), or geographic location, (e.g., Los Angeles, New York, Chicago), to quickly find the news that's relevant to you. That saves you time, and relieves the guilt associated with reading information that you can't bill for.
Every lawyer we know waits until the last minute to purchase gifts, whether for holidays, anniversaries, or birthdays. We like to think that it’s due to limited free time and hourly billables.
Regardless of the reason, if you still have holiday shopping to complete for your kids, we have a helpful suggestion for those of you with children who want pets for Christmas: Gerbils are illegal pets in California.
California is a state of transients, so those of us who were not born and raised here may be surprised by this news.
Back in our college days, when we spent our summers making court runs for a local law firm, we occasionally got pulled from court run duty to organize files for the firm’s busier attorneys. We’ve never met a sticky label we didn’t like, so we could usually turn two years’ worth of filing into a perfectly-organized system in 10 days.
If cloud computing services had been available in our college days, we would have endured fewer paper cuts.
Cloud computing allows lawyers to store information in a virtual site. Documents stay synched, reducing that amount of time lawyers waste sending different versions of documents their colleagues. More importantly, information stored on the cloud is available to any authorized user with an Internet connection. Cloud computing services are particularly popular among tech-savvy Silicon Valley law firms.
The California Supreme Court this week denied two petitions for writs of mandate challenging the validity of redistricting maps that have been certified by the Citizens Redistricting Commission. The court also denied a request for an emergency stay of the certified maps.
California Republicans contested the congressional and State Senate maps in a closed session of the State Supreme Court, alleging that some of the boundaries violated state constitutional requirements for compact, contiguous districts. Challengers also argued that the maps did not comply with the federal voting rights law governing minority representation, reports Los Angeles Times.
Halloween is a time for costumes, candy, and revelry, but it is also perceived as a time when children are more susceptible to sexual predators' attacks.
Perhaps that's because it's one of the only times that parents suspend the standard safety rules for their kids. While most days, kids are told to avoid talking to strangers or going to strangers' homes, all bets are off on Halloween.
Should a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge receive millions of dollars in free services from a Los Angeles-based law firm?
According to his latest financial disclosures, George W. Bush-appointee Judge Jay Bybee has accepted more than $3.2 million in free legal services from global super-firm Latham & Watkins, reports The Wall Street Journal. The firm provided Judge Bybee legal assistance as he fought a five-year ethics inquiry by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).
